Valorant wants to become the biggest shooter in e-sports in 2023 – wants to overtake Rainbow Six and CS:GO

Valorant shows big plans in the new roadmap for 2023. Riot is fully committed to e-sports and wants to oust big competitors like Rainbow Six Siege and Counter-Strike (CS:GO). This should be possible through the preparatory work in League of Legends.

How is Valorant doing?

• In June 2020, Valorant was released as a new tactical shooter that is primarily intended to appeal to Counter-Strike fans. Fans were already sure in 2020: It will be 10 times better than Overwatch.
• Over the years, Valorant has evolved, with Riot providing it with new content and heroes. In 2022, Valorant is still one of the best multiplayer shooters.
• Now, on April 28, Valorant reveals how things should continue in 2023 – shortly after the introduction of the new heroine Fade.

E-sport as a goal and everyone should be able to participate

This is the roadmap: In the update for the coming year, Valorant maker Riot mainly talks about plans to strengthen e-sports. That is the big goal for the coming year. There are various stops on the roadmap:

• 3 new international leagues where teams from America, Europe and Asia compete against each other.
• The best teams qualify for the Masters and the “VALORANT Champions”, in which the world champions are crowned.
• New national leagues should enable young talents to advance to the big professional leagues.

Riot is already looking for sponsors and partners to fund and support the new leagues. The aim should be that selected organizations do not have to pay any admission or participation fees in order to make e-sports more accessible.

What’s in it for players? Valorant is getting a new competitive game mode. This supplements the existing leaderboard and is intended to help teams to identify young talent and to be able to entice them away and train them at an early stage.

Riot also wants to offer annual scholarships for It is not yet known how large the financial grants will be and who can qualify. Whalen Rozelle, Head of Esports Operations at Riot, says:

With Valorant, in addition to an exciting e-sport, we also want to build ambitious, efficiently managed teams that can serve as role models for the industry. Our long-term partnership model also allows teams to grow their business in tandem with the overall growth of Valorant esports.

However, there should be an opportunity for fans to express their loyalty to their teams. Content should come with it. Here, too, further information is missing, but it is conceivable that exclusive skins will come for the heroes, similar to the Overwatch League.

LoL is said to help become the “world’s leading first-person shooter e-sport”.

That is the goal: According to the press release, Valorant wants to become the largest first-person shooter in e-sports. That means at least four big names need to be overhauled, which according to the Statistics page Esports Earnings present properly:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with over $132 million in prize money to date
• Fortnite with over $112 million in prize money so far
• Overwatch with over $33 million in prize money so far
• Rainbow Six Siege with over $23 million in prize money to date

Although this is a total of prize money over many years, even individual tournaments are sometimes endowed with over 15 million dollars at the top. On average, it is usually between 2 and 4 million dollars. So the competition is doing well.

Although Fortnite is not a “first-person” shooter, it should still fall into Valorant’s competitors, similar to CoD: Warzone and PUBG. However, “Battle Royale” games are a different category than classic shooters. However, Riot says they can score with experience here.

How is this supposed to work? According to Riot, the experience of the last 10 years with League of Legends is helping to establish Valorant as an e-sport. LoL has allowed the company to better connect with teams to build partnerships and a true “ecosystem.”

Riot wants to score points through fair payment for the players, as well as through a “more robust help system”. Whether all this will work for Valorant 2023 remains to be seen.

The competition is meanwhile already at the start with a new title. Overwatch 2 is in development at Blizzard and is expected to be released in 2023. We could already play it:

Overwatch 2 feels like a whole new game, although almost everything has stayed the same